An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Monday, March 19, 2012

How I Became an all Expenses Paid Guest of Uncle Sam—The Interim

The IWW designate me a Class War Prisoner.

Note:This
continues a series of memoir posts about my experience as a Draft Resister
during the Vietnam War. A version of this first appeared in two parts on The
Third City blog.

Judge
Sam Perry gave me two weeks to put my affairs in order before
reporting to begin my three year sentence for draft resistance.I actually
had damn few affairs to put in order.My
life was pretty simple.But I was
grateful, I guess for a little time to prepare.

I had to figure out
what to do about work.That was second
shift at the Schwinn Bicycle framing
plant on the west side.At first I
planned to put in the final two weeks on the job, mostly so my girl friend Cecelia would have a little cushion for
taking up the entire cost of rent and utilities at our place on Freemont Street.I knew she was worried about that.But we finally decided for me to give a
week’s notice instead.

My foreman at the plant
was more than a little ticked off when I told him.I was the only guy who was cross trained on
all of the welding machines on the line, the spot welders that attached clips
and small parts and even the big flash welder that fused the front forks to the
main frame.I could take the place of
anyone who missed a shift or cycle in and of machines so the operator could go
to the bathroom or seek first aid for the frequent injuries associated with hot
metal and a fast paced line.He told me
he would never have spent so much time “developing me” if he knew I was
planning to up and quit on him for no good reason.I hadn’t explained why I was leaving.He told me not to come crawling back when I
couldn’t get as good a job.

I did share what was
going on with the younger guys on the line.They were a little incredulous that I wasn’t just hightailing it to Canada, but supportive.The last Friday, as always, we took our
checks to be cashed at a nearby saloon over lunch.We smoked dope in the car on the way
there.The guys each bought me a quick
shot.I bought them some too.We smoked another doobie on the way back.

Got there 45 minutes
late.The line was at a standstill.The foreman was fuming.He yelled at the other guys and told them they
were all written up.But he needed us
and sent us all back to the line despite our generally obvious impairment.I want to apologize now to any bicycle buyers
who might have purchased a product produced on that line the wee small hours of
the morning.I hope no one was killed.

I phoned my councilor
at the American Friends Service
Committee and reported the outcome of my trial.He was astounded and angry that my lawyer, Jason Below, had not even tried to use
the defense based on my not being told that I had been removed from the pool of
eligibility, which they had recommended to him.He suggested that I should file an appeal based on “incompetency of
council.”

Hmm.I turned that notion over in my mind for a
moment.I pictured the likely result of
marching into Federal court and charging that my lawyer, one of the best known
hot shot corporate attorneys in Chicago
and one who had volunteered his services selflessly to me at no cost, with
incompetence.Likely to a Judge who
belonged to the same posh downtown clubs and whose wives served on the same
charity boards.I envisioned being sent
to hard time in Leavenworth for life.I told my councilor I’d take a pass on that.

He did say I could file
a request to have my sentenced reduced, but I couldn’t do that until I was
actually in the slammer.I could draw up
the papers myself from the joint, he said.Just find a jail house lawyer to show me how.He assured me there would be no shortage of
them.I was dubious, but it turned out
he was right.

Another task was
figuring out what, if anything, to tell my mother who was physically ill and in
very precarious mental health.Phone
consultation with my Dad in Des Moines
resulted in an elaborate scheme.I would
call her and tell her that I had just signed up with the merchant marine and
was shipping out immediately on a tramp steamer.I obtained some picture post cards from
various ports in South America, Africa, and Europe and wrote brief messages on them spaced over the next three
years.I sent them to Dad who arranged
with various people to post them from the cities at intervals.

The whole scheme was so
lame, and so unbelievable that anyone with any sense could have seen through it
in a trice.My mother, however, was a
champion of willful denial of bad news and it turned out swallowed the whole
thing hook, line, and sinker.

A lot of my time was
spent making the rounds of friends, fellow workers in the IWW, and others who I had had collaborated with in various radical
episodes.I guess when I started out on
this, I imagined that I would be lionized as a brave martyr to the
revolution.I imagined that going to
prison would punch my ticket as a revolutionary.After all hadn’t all of the great ones done
time in the slammer and come out stronger and more committed?I was sadly disillusioned to learn that
almost no one else shared this view.Most of them knew me too well to detect anything heroic about me.

Take my friends at Solidarity Bookstore, the anarchist hotbed on Armitage Avenue across from Waller High School.The folks there were all Wobblies, but also much more ideological than many of us.I had joined their collective and taken
shifts at the store and had joined in creating a Chicago chapter of the International Black Cross, an
organization dedicated to the defense of anarchists around the world charged
with crimes and supporting “class war prisoners.” I co-edited and contributed
to Black Cross Bulletin which was circulated around the world.

I assumed in light of
our work with prisoners that my sacrifices would be particularly appreciated
there.Not so much.The general consensus was that I was
“collaborating with the state” in my own persecution.A real revolutionary, I was told, would never
voluntarily surrender.Instead, I should
go underground and form or join a revolutionary cell ready to smash the state
by any means necessary.Failing that I
should at least go to Canada and fight on as an exile.

Despite this
assessment, my friends agreed to help me with a project at self-improvement in
the joint.The good Quakers had informed me that I would be able to receive books in
Federal prison provided they were shipped directly from a book store and I
filled out some paperwork.I selected a
number of volumes from the bookstore that I had never had time to read—a new
edition of the writings of Russian
anarchist Mikhail Bakunin translated and edited by
an old friend, Sam Dolgoff, several
books on the Spanish Civil War and
anarchist collectives, and some studies of more modern European workers’ self management experiments.Following the example of Eugene V. Debs and other heroes, I planned to educate myself.It worked too, those books made it past
censorship and helped me while away many an hour.

I got a little
more support at IWW headquarters.Carlos Cortez, with whom I shared
principle editing duties on a staff collective for the Industrial Worker was naturally
supportive.Not only did we work
together extremely closely, but the legendary artist/poet/editor was a rare World War II draft resistor.And in fact he had been sent to Sandstone, Minnesota to help build and be a first guest in the prison
there—the same place I had just been informed would be my new home for the
immediate future.Together we worked on
some copy for the paper about my trial and upcoming absence.The union’s General Defense Committee also enrolled me as a class war prisoner
and set me up to receive the usual $10 a month to be deposited in my commissary
account, which would turn out to be pretty much all of my mad money for the
duration.

Fred Thompson was my mentor.He had served a
stretch of hard time at San Quentin
in the 1920’s on a charge of criminal syndicalism—basically for handing out the
Industrial
Workers to striking hops pickers. That
was a common fate of the old Wobblies I knew.Fred had a story to tell me by way of advice.

Laying in his
cell night after night, he could tell by certain tell tale moans and groans
that the other denizens of his tier passed the time almost every night beating
their meat.Fred took a dim view of
this.Not on any moral grounds,
however.He was convinced that repeated
overstimulation would rob the act of the value of its “therapeutic
release.”So he organized the guys to
masturbate just once a week.That’s
right.A few years later I asked another
old fellow worker, Herb Edwards, who
had been in the pen with him if the story was true.It sure was, he said in his heavy Norwegian
accent, “and that’s why Fred was the best damn organizer I ever saw.”

None the less, in
the course of my confinement I can’t say I successfully followed Fred’s advice.

Most of the
Wobblies, however, were puzzled why I didn’t just book for the border.And lo these many years later I still get the
same question every time the subject comes up. So at the risk of interrupting
the smooth flow of the narrative, I’ll take a moment to explain. You are free
to decide if it’s bullshit.

Despite my proud
radicalism, a good chunk of me remained the idealistic, and even patriotic, kid
who grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming.My first lesson in civic morality—often
reinforced by my father—was Davy
Crocket’s motto, “Be sure your right, then go ahead.”Which, by the way, would turn out to be a
pretty good shorthand for the high flown philosophy I later picked up from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I was also
deeply impressed by the naïve patriotism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

So when, after
considerable wrestling, I decided that the Vietnam
War as a moral abomination in which I could not in good conscience
participate, I was almost genetically programmed to stand up and act on my
belief.That meant, to me, doing it
proudly, openly and willing to take the consequences for my action.There was actually more than a little
swaggering machismo in that notion.

The same sense
of patriotism kept me from joining the thousands who left the country.Good or bad, I was American.And I wanted to
stay in America.When the whole thing
was over, I wanted to be able to go about my business as a free citizen, which
is to say I wanted to stay in this country and continue to make trouble.I couldn’t do that in exile.

My refusal to go
underground was simple vanity.I did not
want to give up being Patrick Mills
Murfin.I liked that guy.I had many noble aspirations for him and
dreams of glory.I wanted to write the Great American Novel and have my name
emblazoned on the cover and on whatever they give you for the Pulitzer Prize.I wanted to be the subject of admiring
biographies when I was dead and buried.Hell, I wanted someone to make a movie of my life and cast whoever was
that year’s Paul Newman in the lead.
The anonymity of a life on the run could not compete with that level monumental
egotism.

So it was
resistance and waltzing into prison, trumpets blaring, for me.

Except that no
one was really tooting those horns.As
the days ticked down and I finished my rounds of visits, I was taken aback by
how everyone seemed perfectly capable and willing to go on with their lives in
my absence.All of my functions were
smoothly being handed off to others, most of whom could do them better.I suspected Cecelia would not long wait
before finding someone else to warm her bed, either.

That last
Saturday I went to the barber for the first time in a few years.I got my hair restored to the same dorky
style I had in high school, parted low on one side, clipped close around the
ears and neck, combed to one side and then back so the front stood up a
little.That brought back the cowlick
that made me look like Dagwood Bumstead.I made this sacrifice, and I shaved my goatee
for the first time since I played King
Henry VIII in Man for All Seasonsback in freshman year of college.I kept the yellowish mustache. This was on the advice of the Quakers to
avoid rough handling by the con barbers in the joint.

Barely
recognizable I attended one last great shebang of a going away party.It must have been a lulu.I have absolutely no recollection who threw
it, where it was held, or how much I drank.I assure you it was a lot.

Then on a Monday
morning I climbed alone to the El platform
for my ride to the Federal Building.